


All This and Eternity Too

by itallstartedwithdefenestration



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-15
Updated: 2013-10-15
Packaged: 2017-12-29 12:01:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1005186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itallstartedwithdefenestration/pseuds/itallstartedwithdefenestration
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam and Lucifer have been best friends since their senior year of high school. Okay, so maybe Sam's a little bit in love with Lucifer, but it's not like he's ever going to say anything. There are no possible outcomes in which Lucifer could actually feel the same way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All This and Eternity Too

**Author's Note:**

> For Samifer Week 2013. 
> 
> This fic would not have been completed without the eternal support and patience of Chee and Mika, who inspired me to write this idea in the first place.

**_January, New Year’s_ **

“If you had to fuck any one person or die, who would you choose?”

Lucifer glances at Sam, one eyebrow raised over the rim of his bottle. “What if I wanted to die instead?”

Sam laughs, sharp and fast huff of breath into his own bright red Solo cup. “Don’t be a smartass, Luce,” he says. “Just answer the damn question.”

Lucifer takes a drink, lips sliding over the mouth of his bottle, fingers wet with the condensation gathered at the base. Sam swallows, looks away; in his slightly drunken state he’s pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to conceal the want that burns, low and steady, at the backs of his irises. 

“Anyone available, I suppose,” Lucifer says finally, and Sam really, _really_ does not feel a pang of disappointment at that. He’s known Lucifer for the better part of four months, for Christ’s sake, it’s not like he could have expected anything _mutual_ yet—

“How about you?” Lucifer adds, voice loose and sloppy around the alcohol, and Sam half chokes on the breath he didn’t realize he was holding.

“Um,” Sam says, slow and cautious. “Not sure.”

Lucifer smirks, nudges Sam’s shoulder with his own. “Madison?” he suggests, in a tone of voice that suggests he knows exactly how Sam would feel about that. 

Sam shoots him his best bitchface. “Luce, really,” he says. 

“Ruby?” 

Okay, now he’s just being cruel. Sam shoves away from Lucifer as far as he can—which, considering the wall directly to his right, is only about four inches—and pointedly glares into his beer. 

“Hey,” Lucifer says, voice sounding far away and too low under the throb of music.

Sam ignores him.

There’s a brief pause, and then Lucifer sighs, directly behind him, a heavy warm gust of air against the back of his neck that pops out goosebumps all along his spine. He hears the bottle being set down, and then there’s Lucifer’s hand on his thigh, patting almost hesitantly. 

“Sam,” Lucifer murmurs. Rough tone of voice that shoots straight to Sam’s dick, and he curls up a little tighter on himself.

“Was joking, okay?” Lucifer says, when Sam doesn’t reply. 

Sam pulls the last remnants of alcohol from the bottom of his cup. The sound of those droplets sliding past his lips is low, and liquid, and strangely lonely. He doesn’t want to turn around, he’s drunk and he’s more than a little horny and he’s _annoyed,_ for Christ’s sake, but Lucifer’s body is a warm presence behind him, solid and alive, and Sam can’t resist him. Hasn’t been able to since the moment they first met in English IV Honors, when Lucifer sat beside Sam and eyed his long, sprawled out legs and asked, all casual, if he was part Great Dane.

“I know,” Sam says finally. He’s turned halfway, but Lucifer is _right fucking there,_ if he turns anymore their noses will be brushing and then there’s no telling how much control Sam will have over himself. “I’m just kind of drunk, not thinking.”

“I noticed,” Lucifer says, a bit dryly. He’s able to hold his liquor a lot better than Sam, which strikes him as pretty ironic considering who their fathers are.

There’s a long silence, punctuated only by the sounds of the music throbbing in the next room—something modern and dubstep that Sam’s pretty sure would give Dean a coronary. 

“Who _would_ you fuck?” Lucifer asks, voice coming out sudden from the darkness of the room.

Sam feels a flush crawling up the sides of his neck. “I dunno, man,” he says. “Already said that.”

He’s pretty sure his unspoken ‘you’ is written all over his face, but Lucifer doesn’t say anything. His eyes are trained somewhere on Sam’s shoulder for a long time, long enough for Sam to open his mouth and ask, “Did I spill something without realizing?” and then Lucifer’s grabbing his arm, hauling them both to their feet. 

Sam’s unsteady when he’s drunk, and he has to balance himself against Lucifer’s chest. He’s trying so hard to focus on keeping himself upright—he’s _taller_ when he’s drunk, somehow—that he barely hears Lucifer’s statement of, “We’re gonna go find you someone to fuck,” and by the time it registers in his brain, they’re already moving out into the crowd.

“Okay, Luce, no,” he’s calling over the pulse of music. But Lucifer’s either ignoring him or being really, really good at pretending to, because suddenly they’re in the kitchen, and he’s tapping Meg on the shoulder. 

She turns, gives them both a bright smile that looks just this side of false under the fluorescent lights. “Sam,” she says. “Lucian,” because apparently only Sam is allowed to know what Lucifer’s given name is. 

“Hey, Meg,” Sam mutters, and gets an elbow in his ribs from Lucifer.

“Sam’s worried that he won’t have anyone to kiss when the ball drops at midnight,” Lucifer says, which is not at all what they were talking about earlier, but Sam supposes that Meg’s smart enough to equate ‘kiss’ with ‘sex’ on her own. 

Sure enough, she’s smirking, her eyes darting between them as she taps her tiny fingers against her glass. “Well,” she says, “I’m more than thrilled at the thought of getting his alcohol-laden tongue stuck halfway down my throat.”

A dull burn of irritation is starting up in Sam’s chest. They’re talking about him like he’s not even _there,_ for god’s sake, and he doesn’t want to kiss Meg—or fuck her, for that matter, he can’t believe Lucifer would do this—

Apparently he’s wearing his emotions on his sleeve tonight, because Lucifer gives him another nudge, less painful than before, and says, “Sam,” voice gravel-rough and steady against the side of his neck. “C’mon, man. It’s my house, you’re my best friend, and I demand you stop moping around. You look like a Golden Retriever that just got soaked in a lake.”

Lucifer’s always comparing Sam to various dog breeds. He doesn’t take nearly as much offense to it as he supposes he should. 

“Um,” Sam says, and looks at Meg. She’s petite and blonde in her maroon jacket and skinny jeans, and not ugly by any standards. Also, she isn’t Ruby or Madison, and it’s almost thirty minutes to midnight. People are gravitating closer to the television set.

“Yeah, okay,” he says, and Meg smirks, setting her drink down. Her eyes are still stuck between Sam and Lucifer.

“Do I get two for the price of one?” she asks, and only then does Sam realize Lucifer’s been holding his arm the entire time. 

Lucifer pulls his fingers away, all slow reluctance, and Sam feels his wrist tingling with the warmth of his touch the whole way upstairs.

*

He doesn’t spend much time in the guest bedroom at the Morningstar house with Meg. Lets her suck him off against the wall, her hands on his thighs, his fingers curled in her hair, and comes picturing Lucifer. Bites back his name, rolling the L into an M as fast as he can, but he thinks Meg hears anyway. She straightens up when she’s done, and watches Sam zip his jeans, tug his shirt hem down.

“Well,” she says. “That was fun.” Smirks at him like she knows exactly what he’s thinking about, and fuck knows, maybe she does. Sam’s too drunk to care.

“Time’s it?” he asks, voice slipping up between words. 

She looks at her watch. “Not quite midnight, just enough time for you to run back out with Lucian.” There’s a challenge barely hidden behind her words, but he doesn’t take it. Doesn’t feel much like dealing with her any more than he has to. He’s a little shaken up from his orgasm, still, but he manages to stumble out of the room, knocking into the doorframe as he goes. He feels gargantuan and out of place like this, all confused and hot and sweaty, smelling like sex and only half-satisfied from the restlessness that’s been shifting around in his chest all evening. 

Lucifer’s still in the kitchen when he gets downstairs. He’s leaning against the refrigerator, texting someone with a tiny frown on his face, and Sam walks up and knocks their shoulders together.

“Well,” Lucifer says, arching an eyebrow and glancing at the time on his phone. “That was quick.”

Sam tucks his head against the crook of Lucifer’s shoulder, just at the place where it meets his neck. “I come fast when I’m drunk,” he says, and then blushes, because holy _fuck_ why did he say that. 

Lucifer just laughs though, a short huff that blows past the hair falling into Sam’s eyes. He’s still texting, fingers moving fast over the keypad of his phone, and Sam sneaks a look at the screen.

 _The party’s going on as long as I like,_ it says. _You aren’t Father, and you can’t tell me what to do._

“You text accurate when you’re drunk,” Sam observes, and Lucifer makes a low noise of surprise in his throat. Like he didn’t remember Sam was standing right there, his head almost pressed against Lucifer’s neck. 

“Michael would have my hide if he knew I’ve been drinking,” Lucifer explains, sending the text and letting his screen go black. 

It’s one of the few times Sam’s ever heard Lucifer talk about his family, and he perks up. “Michael’s not much of a drinker?” 

Lucifer’s features tighten, just for a second, but Sam’s always watching his face, so he notices. “Michael is a self-righteous man who would kiss our father’s ass to keep him happy,” and the note of bitter anger is so evident in his voice that Sam lifts his head off Lucifer’s shoulder. Blinks at him in the sick light coming from the ceiling, at his profile: the sad gray eyes, the soft downturn of his mouth. 

“Luce,” he starts, without any real idea of what he’s going to say, but just then everyone gathered around the television starts to scream:

“ _Ten! Nine! Eight! Seven!”_

They exchange glances. Sam shrugs, tilts his head over. Lucifer nods, grabs his wrist again—fingers hitting in almost exactly the same places as before, making Sam’s whole body freeze up—and they move forward, a little closer to the crowd. Sam and Lucifer are both taller than most of the people here, so it’s not hard to see the television, or the people gathered in Times Square, eyes glued to the giant, glittering ball hovering over the city. 

“ _Three! Two! One!”_ and the ball drops, the date display changes to January 1, 2013, and everyone cheers. 

Sam has half a second to laugh at the sight of a startled Alice McKinnon getting kissed by Tom Munroe, and then Lucifer’s tightening his grip on his wrist, drawing his attention back over. “Sam,” he says, low growl in Sam’s ear that sends shivers down his spine, and then their lips are pressed together, sudden and close in the dark. 

It’s hot and wet and a little messy, and Sam has to lean down at a bad angle for his neck in order to get in a good position to reach Lucifer’s mouth. He tastes beer and that weird salsa dip they were eating earlier, and it’s kind of a disgusting combination, but Sam’s brain is still mostly stuck on the fact that he’s kissing _Lucifer._ Which is—holy shit.

By the time they pull away from each other, people have moved away from the television set and are again draped loosely over the couch, or leaning against walls, or sitting cross-legged on the floor. Sam has a pain in the right side of his neck where he was tilting it to reach Lucifer, and he’s shaking minutely, heart slamming in his chest as he struggles to get his breathing back under control. 

“Okay,” Sam says finally, mouth dry.

Lucifer’s looking up at him, just looking, with his head tilted slightly to the right. He looks like he’s trying to figure something serious and important out about Sam, something that he can’t quite get his finger on but that he needs to know. 

“Luce?” Sam asks, when it’s been probably a full minute and his best friend still hasn’t said anything. He kind of wants to diffuse the tension with a joke—‘better than Meg’, maybe, or ‘am I the available one for your fuck or die response now?’—but neither would be very funny and Sam’s head is spinning with alcohol anyway. He’s not thinking straight, he kind of needs to get out of there.

Lucifer’s eyes are stuck somewhere on the expanse of Sam’s chest. His tongue darts out and wets his lips, a quick movement that Sam tracks without thinking about it, and then he backs up, closer to the crowd of people in his living room.

“Happy New Year, Sam,” Lucifer murmurs, voice barely audible over the blaring music, and then he disappears.

It’s the first time in a long time that Sam and Lucifer have ever been in the same vicinity and not plastered up against each other, like they’re one being.

Sam _really_ fucking needs another drink. 

**_June_ **

“We should take a roadtrip.”

Sam blinks at Lucifer, stretched out languid and lazy in the afternoon sun. “We should do what,” he says.

Lucifer turns to face Sam. He’s lying down, head just at the base of Sam’s legs, and with his eyelids half-lidded and the tiny smile curving the corner of his mouth, the whole scene feels oddly intimate. “Take a roadtrip.” He reaches up with one hand and starts playing with the frayed edge of Sam’s jeans. “It’s not like there’s anything else for us to do here, you know. We’ll be heading out to Stanford in August, anyway, Sam.” His eyes flick down to Sam’s ankle for a second, then back up to his face. “Come on,” he urges, gentle persuasion in his voice, and Sam’s never learned how to say ‘no’ to Lucifer, so he just breathes out, flattening his palms against his thighs, and asks:

“When are we leaving?”

*

They’re on the road now, Sam with his legs sprawled out in front of him, eyes glued to the horizon; Lucifer driving, tapping out the beat of the song with his thumbs. It didn’t take much to convince John to let Sam go—“the faster you’re off to that fancy-ass college, the better,” he’d snarled, with real hate in his eyes, and Sam had to work at not grabbing the bottle from his father’s hand and chucking it at his head. Dean gave Sam a hug and a crumpled wad of car oil-stained twenties. 

Charles, Lucifer’s father, is allowing them to use the Morningstars’ family cabin in Grand Teton National Park. He doesn’t really care what Lucifer does, either.

“So this cabin,” Sam starts.

“What about it?”

“Does it have—” he makes a vague hand gesture and trails off, unsure how to complete the sentence.

“It has heating and air-conditioning,” Lucifer says, an amused smile playing on his lips. “And you won’t have to piss in the woods or anything.”

Sam leans halfway across the console so he can bump their shoulders together. “I know that, Luce, I didn’t think your dad would live in the sticks.”

“‘Live in the sticks’, Sam? What are we on, the Beverly Hillbillies?”

“Been watching a lot of vintage television since graduation?”

“It’s all I live for.” Tiny laugh lines crinkle the corners of his eyes, and Sam resists the urge to reach out and touch.

“No, but really, Luce.” 

“Sam.”

“I was gonna ask—”

“So ask, I’m not stopping you.” Lucifer slides his gaze over, and Sam jerks his eyes away, folding his arms across his chest. Being with Lucifer, talking to him, feels a bit like standing out in the middle of an electric storm with no protection.

“Does the cabin have two rooms?”

He feels a bit like he’s had all the air punched out of him right after he asks.

Lucifer takes a second to answer, quiet and almost apologetic. “Yes, it has several rooms, Sam. My family takes up a lot of space.”

Sam clears his throat to get rid of the taste of disappointment.

“We share a room in the dorms at Stanford,” Lucifer adds, and if Sam wasn’t already so far gone on him, he might want to hate his friend for being so perceptive all the time.

He kicks his legs up onto the dashboard, doesn’t say anything in response. He’s too afraid of giving himself away; that one slip-up in his wording and Lucifer will realize how he hasn’t been able to get the New Year’s Eve party out of his mind.

After a while, Lucifer reaches over and turns up the volume on the radio. He doesn’t push Sam to speak—of course, Lucifer has never pushed Sam a day in his life—but he keeps cutting his eyes over to Sam, his gaze burning a hole in the side of Sam’s neck.

*

In Bumfuck, Nebraska, a town so tiny it isn’t even on the map, they stop for the night in a hotel. Lucifer orders Chinese takeout while Sam takes a shower, and they eat curled up on their beds, watching television lazily through half-closed eyelids. Sometimes Sam sneaks a glance over at Lucifer, but he’s always staring straight ahead, face lit up by the blue glow of the screen.

“Man,” Sam says finally, when the silence and the sound of Rachael Ray’s voice gets to be too much for him to handle, “I can’t believe your dad’s letting you spend four hundred extra bucks just for a night at a motel.”

Lucifer shrugs. Money’s never been an issue for him, not like it is with Sam, and sometimes he seems to forget that not everyone comes from a family that’s richer than God. “Rather this than driving all night and having to sleep in the car.”

Sam wouldn’t mind that. It would mean close proximity if nothing else, and the promise of waking up two inches from Lucifer’s face would be worth any inevitable pain in his neck.

“Oh right, because I forgot, you’re too rich to afford anything other than those tiny-ass lunchboxes on wheels.” 

Lucifer laughs once, dryly, but when Sam glances at him—fast and hesitant under his bangs—he’s smiling, a tiny curvature at the corner of his mouth that crinkles his eyes. 

Sam likes that he can make Lucifer look like that, relaxed and amused and sort of soft all over.

“We seem to have run out of beverages,” Lucifer says. “I think I saw a vending machine on the way up here—”

Sam takes a last bite of egg roll and forces himself out of his reclined position. “I have a better idea,” he says. Gestures with his head in the direction of the mini-fridge under the television set, and Lucifer’s smile widens.

“I like the way you think, Sam,” he murmurs, and Sam doesn’t quite know what it is about the tone of his voice that makes his throat go completely dry.

*

Closer to midnight, they’ve both settled into a semi-conscious state, half-empty beer bottles on their stomachs, some infomercial about knives playing on repeat. They’re on the same bed, because apparently Lucifer doesn’t like the way the screen looks from his mattress, and Sam is tracing numbers up and down Lucifer’s forearm, aware every second of how they’re connected at their thighs, shoulders, the bit of Lucifer’s pinkie toe against the arch of Sam’s foot.

“Choose one,” he says. “Tacos or pasta,” because this is just what they do, they get drunk and they spout random shit at each other, Sam doesn’t know how to be any other way around Lucifer.

“Tacos,” Lucifer says, and a tiny furrow appears between his eyebrows. “Although pasta has certain redeeming qualities that tacos do not. Such as health benefits.”

“What healthy pasta have you ever eaten,” Sam asks, arching an eyebrow.

“Olive Garden,” Lucifer says, gesturing vaguely and settling down into his pillow. 

“Oh yeah, the Endless Bowl of Calories.”

“Hah, very funny, Sam.” Lucifer shoots him a look, half-lidded and close in the dark. “What about you, what do you prefer, you goddamn bloodhound?”

He only curses when he’s really drunk, or really upset. Sam knows this, just a little intermittent bit of knowledge stored into his head about Lucifer, like how he secretly loves Coldplay, and will all but streak out of his house to get the clothes out of the dryer first, so he can bury his face in their warmth. 

“Tacos,” Sam says out loud, and suddenly he’s thinking about tacos, about how hot they are, and how crunchy, the shell folded over itself and barely holding in the beef. He pictures Lucifer eating one, the way the extra liquid from the sauce and the meat would run down the curve of his wrist so that maybe Lucifer would have to lick it off his skin, a slow, tantalizing swipe of tongue, and his finger stills against Lucifer’s arm. 

He doesn’t know how much longer he can go like this.

Lucifer gives a sort of sleepy nod, settling further back against the mattress, his head drifting just shy of Sam’s shoulder. He smells warm, and pleasant, like the sweet-and-sour chicken he was eating earlier, and like laundry detergent. His foot knocks against Sam’s a few times, and he murmurs:

“Probably some kind of Mexican place near our dorm,” and he turns his head a little, tilting it up until they’re facing each other fully. On the television, the infomercial guy is making some glib pun about knives, there’s traffic rushing outside in a faint, dull roar, but all Sam can hear is Lucifer’s breathing, two inches from his face. Sam’s hand is still lingering on his arm, a feeling in his chest like he’s two seconds away from falling off a dangerously high precipice, but he doesn’t move, doesn’t even blink hardly. They fall asleep like that, facing each other, backs against the headboard, the arch of Sam’s foot pressing against Lucifer’s, his heart racing in his chest.

*

The Morningstars’ cabin is smaller than Sam had expected: three rooms, two baths, a kitchen area, and a mudroom. It’s off some mostly deserted highway, surrounded by trees and mountains, and when Sam stands in the kitchen and looks out the window, he feels detached from everything else. 

The walls are thin. Sam finds this out the first night they’re there, after they’ve eaten supper and cleared the table and gone to their respective rooms to empty their bags for a few months. There are two bathrooms, but only one has a shower, and Lucifer gets it first.

“Don’t hog all the hot water, or I’m dumping your ass outside until August,” Sam calls. “You can beg food off the two people that we’ll see all summer.”

“I’m forced at this point to remind you that only one of us can cook, and it isn’t the guy who’s six-foot-infinity and drowning in plaid,” Lucifer says, and doesn’t quite shut the door fast enough to hide his smile.

Ten minutes later, Sam’s folding his shirts—not all of which are plaid, fuck you very much—when he hears a low, almost pained sound come from in the bathroom. He jerks, thinking _shit_ and _what if he’s fallen_ and, selfishly, _how’m I supposed to survive an entire summer without him,_ and then he hears water sloshing rhythmically, a few tense, punched-out grunts, and he thinks, _oh._

He tries not to listen. He can’t actually believe the walls are this thin, figures maybe if he shut his door it’d be better, but he can’t make himself move from where he’s standing, uncertain and a little flushed at his bedside. He can feel his dick giving a twitch of interest, and tries to talk it down, but ends up having to cup his crotch instead, letting out a little sigh into the cotton of his dark-gray Jurassic Park t-shirt while Lucifer exhales shakily next door.

He thinks maybe he should be angry at Lucifer for doing this when he probably knows full well how fucking _paper-thin_ the walls are in his _family’s cabin,_ but he can’t bring himself quite to that state, not even when he hears something solid colliding with ceramic and Lucifer making this interesting, harsh sound, more water sloshing around. 

Sam’s hard as hell, and has to lie down, pressing his nose into the bedsheets and inhaling the scent of mothballs, to make it stop. 

*

“So I was thinking,” Lucifer starts one afternoon, when they’ve been there for a week and Sam’s had time to get used to how cold the floorboards are at night and the low, grinding sound the water heater makes when it first starts up in the attic.

“Oh, color me shocked,” Sam says, and ducks as Lucifer throws a pillow at his head. 

“No, really,” Lucifer says. “I wanted to take you somewhere local.”

 _Like a date?_ Sam almost asks, and practically swallows his tongue to keep the words in.

“There are local places around here?” is what he asks instead, and Lucifer snorts.

“Half-buried under snow and tucked behind mountains, yes, there are local places, Sam. But it’s not a restaurant, it’s a hiking trail. I want to take you hiking.”

Sam shoots him a surprised look. “Okay?” he says, a little confused, eyebrows drawing together over the bridge of his nose. 

“It’s just something,” Lucifer says, shrugging at the floor. “We used to do it when we’d come up here in the summer.”

Sam takes a moment to picture Lucifer younger, before they knew each other, on a mountain path with his father and his brothers and sister. He’s never actually met any of Lucifer’s family, except Gabriel, once, but he sees them in his mind as light-haired, stern-faced people, all sinew and corded muscle because that’s how Lucifer is built. An Aryan group of short-tempered humans who could probably blaze the trail in five minutes flat. 

“Yeah,” Sam says, his mind still stuck on the image of Lucifer taking the time out to drink from a bottle of water while he rests on the side of the trail. “Yeah, okay, let’s go.”

Lucifer’s face sort of lights up. “Really?”

Sam smiles back; he can’t help it, not when Lucifer looks like that, his face all open and unfamiliarly happy in the room. “I gotta warn you, though, I can’t navigate for shit.”

Lucifer puts his hand on Sam’s arm for a second, mock-reassurance, and Sam feels his fingers scorching through his skin, all the way down to his bones. “That’s okay,” Lucifer says. “That’s why I’m the one with the map.”

*

They go out the following morning: Sam in a fleece jacket and jeans, Lucifer in Gore-Tex and freaking sweatpants. They hang off his hips, just a little, and Sam watches the movement of his muscles under the layers of his clothes. 

There’s an option to join up with a tour, but Lucifer opts out, saying he remembers the exact path of the trail; that it’s pretty much impossible to get lost as long as they stick to the easiest route and get back to the cabin before it turns dark. Sam shoves two extra energy bars into his backpack, wraps his hands around the straps, and they start forward. 

It’s pretty quiet on the trail, just Lucifer and Sam and the wind. The incline is so gradual that Sam hardly notices, tall as he is and in shape from years of karate lessons with his brother. At first they try keeping up conversation—loose and easy and borderline-flirtatious like always—but Sam can’t get as much air into his lungs that way, and Lucifer’s trying to focus on the map, so they stay silent. Sam watches the back of Lucifer’s head, the easy roll of his shoulders as he moves. He doesn’t think he’ll ever have enough of this, Lucifer and the silence and the clean mountain air piercing his lungs.

“Here,” Lucifer says, and points at a rock, covered in moss and slate gray. No different from anything else they’ve seen so far. 

“This is where you made your epiphany?” 

Lucifer jostles their shoulders together. “This is where I cut my arm open when I was twelve and Michael was really into roughhousing.” He jerks down his sleeve, showing Sam a thin, pale scar on his upper arm. Sam’s never seen it before, even though he’s known Lucifer for nine months. 

“Fuck,” Sam says, whistling through his teeth. “Must’ve hurt.”

Lucifer shrugs, pulling his jacket back up and shivering a little, even though it’s not that cold. “Was okay,” he says. “We got to go home early, at any rate.”

“Where was home?” Sam asks, following Lucifer’s lead and sitting on the stone, opening his water bottle. “I mean. I know you haven’t always lived in Lawrence, we would’ve seen each other if you had.” 

Lucifer makes a vague gesture with one hand. “Everywhere,” he says. “Nowhere. I don’t know. Our father moved around a lot, we were kind of a nomadic family for a long time. He kept this cabin so we could have one place to come to that would always be there.” His voice drops, quieter at the end of his sentence, and he takes a slow drink of water. It’s just the way Sam pictured earlier, the bottle at his lips, the fluid movement of his throat muscles as he swallows, the one bead of water sliding down his neck, and he presses his hand into his thigh, forcing his eyes out over the wilderness in front of them. 

“Was it,” Sam starts, and then stops, clearing his throat, surprised at how hoarse his voice is. The wind here is really cutting his vocal cords. “Was it bad?” He can’t imagine not having Lawrence, the little house Bobby helped their dad build back in the mid-seventies, the auto shop the Winchesters own three blocks from the library. Can’t picture what life must look like from the backseat of a car, always moving in a blur past the window.

“Yes,” Lucifer says, and then caps his water bottle. “Sometimes.” He glances at Sam once, sharp quick movement of his eyes, and slides off the rock. Sam follows. “When we settled down in Lawrence last summer, I would wake up every night for months thinking my father was going to get us all packed and leaving again. It’s very hard to make solid roots anywhere when you live like that, Sam.”

Sam nods. He’s kind of surprised he didn’t know any of this before, but it feels okay, knowing it now. Like how it felt when Lucifer cornered him behind the gym in November and begged him not to tell anyone he was named after Satan. Like Lucifer has all these secrets built up inside him, and is laying them at Sam’s feet, one at a time, discarding his burdens in the hopes that it will make him a little lighter. 

“M’glad you didn’t leave,” Sam says to his feet, hands in his pockets.

There’s a pause. He can feel Lucifer’s eyes on him, watching, waiting for something to happen, though he’s not sure what. He thinks if he looked up, maybe he could clue in, but he’s too terrified of what he might do if he makes eye contact with Lucifer right now. Lucifer, with his emotions laid bare and flat like this in the middle of the Grand Tetons, and Sam, gritting his teeth and only just restraining himself from what he really wants.

“So am I, Sam,” Lucifer says finally. Sam can hear him smiling, and his own lips tug up in response, automatic physical reaction. 

They don’t talk for the rest of the hike, but Sam doesn’t really mind. 

**_August_ **

Lucifer’s got his car filling up at a gas station somewhere between Palo Alto and the Bay Area, and he and Sam are inside the store, Sam keeping one eye on Lucifer’s car and the kid washing his front windshield while Lucifer buys them snacks for the rest of the drive—Skittles, Doritos, a can of Planters peanuts. They’re a week from starting Stanford and about six hours, give or take, from moving into their dorm room, and Sam’s nervous and jittery, shaking one leg as he stands with his forehead pressed against the glass door. Things are going to be different, now. 

“Sam,” Lucifer calls, and Sam’s head shoots up, Pavlovian response to Lucifer’s voice. It’s a quiet voice, low and commanding in a way Sam can’t really explain. Not the sort you’d expect to be able to hear above a crowd, but Sam’s seen a group of fifteen kids get quiet instantly just because Lucifer asked them to. He’d follow Lucifer anywhere if Lucifer asked, pulling the words from the back of his throat, drawing his eyebrows together like he does sometimes.

“Yeah.”

“You want anything else?” Lucifer gestures at his small pile of junk food, there’s a Coke can included and Sam kind of wants to ask for cigarettes, just because, but neither of them smoke and there wouldn’t be a point. 

He shakes his head, and Lucifer pays, using the credit card Sam knows says _‘Lucian Morningstar’_ on it, and then they’re leaving.

“You okay?” Lucifer asks him, while they’re unhooking his car from the gas pump and waiting for the last few suds to get rinsed off the windshield. “You’ve been quiet all day.”

Sam shrugs, nods. “It’s just gonna be,” he starts, quiet, scuffing at the ground with his foot. “College, you know. New thing. Kinda nervous.”

Lucifer does this thing where he tries to look consoling, but it mostly just comes out looking pained. Like he’s just as unsure about all this as Sam. He puts his hand on Sam’s shoulder, and Sam tenses without meaning to, feeling the searing heat of Lucifer’s palm through the thin layer of his shirt.

“Oh,” Lucifer says quietly, and draws his hand away. He glares at the kid, and “You done yet?” he snaps, getting irritable and a little terrifying like he’s been known to do sometimes.

“Yeah,” the kid says, and backs off. “Sure. Sorry.” He shoots them both an edgy, uncertain look, but Sam just ducks into the passenger seat, doesn’t say anything. Lucifer gets in a second later, plastic bag crinkling on the console between them, and gives Sam a brief glance before putting the car in drive and moving back towards the highway.

They aren’t even in college yet, for Christ’s sake, and it’s already getting difficult.

*

What Sam doesn’t think Lucifer understands, what Sam’s not even sure if he understands himself, is that he’s been completely ruined for his best friend since the day they met.

They’ve basically been each other’s only friends since English IV Honors, which Sam is completely fine with, since no one else in their grade was intelligent enough to hold a conversation beyond pop culture references and “oh god, you’re Sam _Winchester?_ Your brother is so _hot!”_ But it makes things difficult, too, because he loves Lucifer, and he’s _in love with_ Lucifer, and he doesn’t have anyone to talk to about it. Except Dean, when he’s not passing out from exhaustion, but that’s a rare occurrence, and anyway, Sam’s half a continent away from his brother now. He can’t whip out his phone and call every single time he wants to go through with his newest plans, whatever they are, and he can’t text because Dean doesn’t really like to text unless it’s an emergency. 

So Sam’s basically screwed, because Lucifer will be in the same room as him for an entire year, studying curled up on his mattress, pushing his hand through his hair while he leans over his laptop, breathing out slow through his mouth while he sleeps—which Sam knows how Lucifer sounds when he sleeps, now, thanks to the cabin and its fucking thin walls—or sucking on the mouth of a bottle, or rucking his shirt up when he moves, or. Whatever he does. Driving Sam crazy with want. 

Mother _fucker._

There’s also that _thing_ that happened in the cabin, not just the first night they were there but the thing right before they left, too, and it’s been catapulting through Sam’s mind ever since. He can’t drown it out, no matter how loud Lucifer turns the radio up, he can’t get it out of his visual memory and when he closes his eyes, it’s _right fucking there,_ full Technicolor replay of every second of the _incident._ Clouded over with the scent-memory of marijuana smoke, and the taste of beer at the back of his throat, and Sam wonders why every single thing has to happen to him when he’s drunk.

Lucifer leans over and nudges Sam’s shoulder with his own, like he’s been doing since the dawn of time, and Sam jerks, leaving a greasy streak on the window where he had his forehead pressed just a second ago. 

“Luce,” he says, quietly, because at least that much hasn’t changed.

“Sam,” Lucifer says, without really taking his eyes off the road, and, “look out the window, man.”

Sam looks. 

The Pacific coast stretches out to their right, infinite and blue and sparkling in the afternoon sun. 

Sam’s heart is in his throat. He feels like he should say something significant, because they’re here, they’re on the coastal highway and they’re spinning towards what Sam’s sure will be their ultimate demise, but all he can manage is:

“ _Fuck,”_ in a sort of awed tone. Voice choking at the back of his throat, and he reminds himself not to drink his Coke too quickly next time.

“Yeah,” Lucifer says, hands on the steering wheel, back pressed against his seat. “Yeah.”

*

Stanford is a metropolis. 

It sprawls over 8180 acres of land in the Silicon Valley, within driving distance of Palo Alto. Sam’s never seen so many people in one place, teenagers and adults rushing to get wherever they’re heading. Suitcases laid flat on the ground beside flashy cars as the parents of children speak in raised tones to confused looking moving aides. Upperclassmen moving into their apartments, wise and knowledgeable already in their grip on the campus.

Everyone screams _California_ at Sam. They’re all tall—though none are as tall as Sam is, and he finds himself hunching his shoulders to try and blend in with the crowd—with tans and golden hair, perfect white smiles and cute button noses. The girls all wear gym shorts or Daisy Dukes; the guys are in pressed jeans and button-downs. They’re on iPhones and Samsung Galaxies, tapping away with glittering manicured nails. 

“No one warned me it would be like stepping into an episode of Gilmore Girls,” Lucifer mutters, dragging his suitcase out of the trunk of his car, and for a second, the tension shifts between them, making things a little easier to handle as Sam grabs his own things and hauls them over his shoulder. 

“It’s like every expensive mall in New York City got airlifted across the country and dumped all their inhabitants here,” Sam says, pushing his hair out of his eyes. “I can practically smell money on their clothes.”

Lucifer snorts. “I suppose they’ve all got a sixth sense that hones in on rich people; I figure I have ten minutes before I start sporting Ray-Bans and a Rolex.”

Sam grabs Lucifer’s wrist without thinking, twists it over in his hands. “I don’t see anything so far,” he says, “your skin doesn’t seem to be bubbling up with anything watch-shaped from the inside.”

Lucifer laughs once, an abortive sound that gets lost in the crowd around them, and Sam is suddenly aware of how large his hands are on Lucifer’s arm, how close they’re standing, even with everyone around them at least twenty feet away. 

He backs up. “Um,” he says. “I’m just gonna take our stuff to the check-in desk in the dorm, you should go park your car.”

A tiny crease appears between Lucifer’s eyebrows; back at the start of summer, before the roadtrip and the hotel room and the cabin, they’d promised each other that, until they got a layout of the place and started going to class, they weren’t going to leave each other’s sides. Stanford isn’t exactly a small university, and Lucifer knows how Sam gets in crowds. 

But he just shrugs, and “Yeah,” he says, “okay, Sam. If you can pick up my key while you’re signing in, that would be fantastic.”

“If they’ll let me,” Sam says, and lifts their bags to carry into the dorm. He and Lucifer don’t have a lot of things compared to everyone else; Lucifer has two suitcases and his laptop case, and Sam has a duffel and a backpack stuffed with clothes. Still, it’s a bit of a load, and Sam’s straining by the time he reaches the door.

“Oh,” says a voice behind him, “let me—” and there’s a clumsy scrape of movement and then the door is opening almost directly onto Sam’s forehead. 

“Shit!” says the unfamiliar voice, and the door bangs back into place.

Sam turns. “It’s fine,” he starts.

The girl who almost knocked him out is blushing fiercely. She’s tall—not quite up to his shoulder—and blonde, not in the same way as Lucifer, more like corn silk. “Um,” she says. “God, I’m so clumsy.”

He shakes his head, readjusting his grip on the bags and pushing on the door again with his shoulder, hooking one leg around the frame to keep it open while he tries to get inside. “Really,” he says. “It’s okay.” And then, impulsively, adds, “My name’s Sam.”

“Jess,” she says, holding out a hand and looking relieved. “It’s nice to meet you.”

They go to a table just inside the lobby, where they have forms to fill out and a few papers to sign. Sam grabs an extra copy for Lucifer when the student assistants are looking the other way, and two sets of room keys.

“You’re in room three-fifty,” the guy behind the desk tells him, looking bored out of his mind. And, to Jess, “Room two thirty-nine.”

“Oh my god,” Jess says, bubbly and happy as she and Sam head down the hall towards the elevators. “I’m so excited. Are you excited? Stanford’s been my dream school since I was fourteen.”

“Yeah, I’m excited,” Sam tells her, feeling his phone buzz in his pocket and pulling it out. “Just a second,” he adds, and slides his thumb across the screen.

 _Just parked the car,_ Lucifer’s text reads. _Did you get my key?_

 _Yeah,_ Sam texts back. _Rm 350. Better hurry before they throw me in jail for property theft._

The response comes immediate and amused. _You’re a lawyer, you take care of it._

 _Not yet,_ Sam replies, biting back a smile, and then the elevator arrives.

“Do you know your roommate yet?” Jess asks as they step in.

Sam nods.

“I don’t,” Jess says. “I’m excited, though. We’ve texted before, her name’s Amelia. She seems really nice.” She smiles up at Sam, all bright white California happiness, and he feels a sudden pang in his chest. He’s never met anyone so cheerful before. It hurts a little.

The elevator stops at the second floor, and Jess gets off, then leans against the door to keep it open. “Will I see you tonight?” she asks. 

Sam’s eyebrows draw together. “Tonight?”

“Yeah, there’s a barbeque down at the Carson Bar and Grill. You and your roommate should come.”

Sam entertains a brief, humorous mental image of himself and Lucifer eating blackened sausages and being social. 

“No,” he says, and pretends not to notice the way her face falls. “Maybe another time.”

She shrugs, steps away. “Yeah. Sure.” The California smile comes back, halfway and hesitant. “See you around, Sam.” The door shuts, and Sam lets out a breath.

Ten minutes after he gets to room three-fifty, Lucifer comes up as well, slipping through the door Sam left cracked open and dropping his keys on the other mattress. “Hello, Sam,” he murmurs, picking up his biggest suitcase and unzipping it.

“Luce,” Sam says. He tosses the room key and extra forms over. “There, consider that the ending of my career of grand larceny.”

Lucifer laughs softly under his breath. “Has anyone gotten terrified by your size yet?” 

“Actually,” Sam starts, a little hesitant, and Lucifer looks at him then, questioning tilt to his head at the sound of Sam’s voice. “I’ve um. I’ve met someone.”

A month ago, less than that, even, Lucifer would have nudged Sam’s ribs with his elbow, asked if this person was better-looking than him. If he had to worry about Sam eloping, giving up on their marriage plans before they’d even had a chance to make any. But it’s not like that now, it’s walking on tenterhooks and tasting the weight of each word in their mouths before speaking, so all Lucifer says is, “Great,” in a rough, practiced manner.

 _You’re a terrible liar, Luce,_ Sam thinks. Says, “Yeah, her name’s Jess, she lives one floor down,” and doesn’t miss the way Lucifer’s shoulders go tense.

“Was she automatically drawn to you,” Lucifer asks, after a really long, telling pause, “or did you actually have to work at impressing her? Pull out the flashcards and the sign that says ‘I’m a lawyer, I’ll argue during orgasm’?”

Sam can’t tell if Lucifer is teasing or just being an asshole, which is strange, because normally he knows Lucifer’s intentions better than his own. Reads him like a bright-lit neon sign at midnight, and can respond immediately in kind, no matter what Lucifer throws at him. 

But this. This is new, and almost angry, and Sam doesn’t know what to do with it.

“I had to pull out the sign,” Sam says finally, because if the silence goes any longer he’ll choke on it. “She hit the stop button on the elevator right then, we almost did it right there on the chrome-polished floor.” And then he kind of feels terrible, because he barely knows Jess, what is he _doing,_ letting Lucifer get under his skin like this. 

Lucifer has an odd, drawn expression on his face. “So she sucked you off.”

Sam flinches. Snatches of that last night in the cabin, the night that everything went to hell, are flying through his brain on Technicolor display. He’s not aware of anything right now except how furious he is, furious and drawn up tight as a bow; he can’t tell if he wants to fight Lucifer or fuck him, and that at least is no different than any other day. 

“I think you know fucking well she didn’t,” Sam says, taking a breath. 

“Three flights up on an elevator, you must’ve needed _something_ to pass the time.” He’s just this short of outright sneering at Sam, baiting him, something he’s not used to from Lucifer, who is predictable to a certain extent, especially around Sam. Sam, who has known him for close to a year now, and has never, not once, wanted to fight him. Not as badly as he does now.

“She invited us to a party. I declined.” Sam arches an eyebrow, folds his arms across his chest. “Unless you _want_ to go?”

He’s aware that it’s his fault there’s this tension in the room now—he shouldn’t have worded it like that, _I met someone,_ like Jess is significant in his life suddenly after five seconds, but—he can’t. He can’t keep playing this game with Lucifer, feeling weird and stretched almost to the breaking point. It’s going to be a long, long nine months if they don’t stop soon. 

Getting Lucifer to think maybe that night didn’t mean as much as it actually did, the colossal significance of it looming like the Grand Canyon in Sam’s mind, every second of every day, that might be a start on the road to recovery. For both of them.

“A party,” Lucifer repeats, drawing the words out like they offend him. “With these college kids—” Lucifer’s always calling them ‘kids’, as if he and Sam aren’t only a year older than everyone else. “Getting drunk off our asses, falling into bed with some chicks?”

Sam does not at all go a brief, maddening shade of red at the image Lucifer’s words are bringing up.

“You wanna go to a party, Sam?” His voice is a little lower than before. “With this Jess person?”

Sam can feel his jaw tightening. “No,” he snarls, scraping a hand down his face. He wants to erase today, this past week, all of it. He wants to start over, go back to that night at the cabin, with the storm and the power outage and Lucifer’s voice when he asked Sam to help him drink all the beer in the fridge to keep it from getting warm and disgusting. He wants to get them a backup generator so that they don’t have to bring out the candles and get drunk off their asses, too close and warm and comfortable with each other on the couch.

Something minute and almost dangerous shifts in Lucifer’s expression, and Sam wonders when he’ll learn how to stop wearing his emotions on his sleeve around his friend. “Then why did you even bring it up, Sam?” His voice is harsh, and wrecked, and tired, and Sam doesn’t know what to do. Lucifer’s always shone brightest in his life, out of anyone else; he can’t see anything else when his friend is there, just Lucifer and the quiet power he radiates. 

It’s times like this, even when they’re standing precarious and on the brink of falling, that Sam knows he’d take Lucifer any way he could get him. Any way at all, if it meant getting Lucifer to stay.

“I don’t know,” Sam says out loud, feeling his heart going at six hundred miles an hour. He wants to walk forward and take Lucifer in his arms, make him drop those shirts and press him back against the mattress and kiss him until they’re both dizzy with it, this fire in Sam’s veins. “I. I’m gonna go take the forms back down, have you filled yours out yet.”

“No,” Lucifer says, evidently befuddled by the abrupt subject change. “I was too busy fighting with some freakishly tall guy.”

Sam makes a sound that might have been a laugh on a better day, grabs Lucifer’s form off his mattress. “I’ll fill yours out too,” he says, and, “I can forge your signature, it’s not a problem.”

Lucifer looks like he wants to reply with something, but he settles on nodding instead, short and clipped before turning back to his clothes. 

Sam scrawls his signature and Lucifer’s over the forms in their makeshift kitchen, checking off “good condition” boxes for all their appliances and wishing he could get rid of the tightness in his chest a little easier.

**_October_ **

“It doesn’t get cold here,” Sam says, one afternoon when he and Lucifer are studying together in the library, where they’re less likely to get distracted by the television set in their room or the bursts of noise that come from down the hall. 

“It’s California, Sam, did you expect snow in September?” Lucifer asks, eyebrow raised over his Ecology textbook.

They’ve reestablished a tentative comfortable level in their friendship—it’s awkward sometimes, still, like the night it was blazing hot in the dorm and Lucifer was showering with the bathroom door open, giving Sam more than a small glimpse of his back and his ass when he came in from class; or like the night Sam couldn’t sleep but thought Lucifer was dead to the world, so he slid his hand down the front of his sweats and jerked off fast and guilty under the sheets, muffling his grunts in the pillow and shaking a little when he came, and only found out the next morning that Lucifer had been awake the entire time, staring at the ceiling and counting cracks in the plaster and trying so hard not to rub off through his pants. But it’s never anyone but them in their dorm, or at lunch, or in the library, and Sam figures anything that happens at night is accidental and should be listed under Things They Never Talk About, right behind the Cabin Incident and the New Years’ Eve Party.

All in all, college isn’t too bad. Sam likes his classes, most of his professors, the few friends he’s made that aren’t Lucifer—Jess and her roommate Amelia, who always talk to Sam when they see him in the laundry room or at the food court; and a guy named Brady in his pre-law class. He’s called Dean three times, always asks how John’s doing and never gets a satisfactory response—not like he cares. He’s never seen Lucifer even try contacting his family, but that’s a whole different matter and Sam would really rather not get into it too deeply.

“It could be lower than eighty-thousand degrees outside,” Sam points out, highlighting an entire paragraph about perjury in his textbook because his professor was too vague in class to explain what she wanted for them to study.

“You have less than no sense of adventure. I once stayed in Louisiana for six whole months, it never got below ninety-five the whole time I was there.” 

“Just because you’ve been halfway across the United States and back, you think you’re destined to be some kind of weatherman.”

Lucifer grins once, brilliant flash of teeth over some article on the environment. “‘Go fuck yourself, San Diego.’”

Sam snorts, and then has to bury his face in his textbook when one of the librarians glares at him over her horn-rimmed spectacles. “Oops, I think we’re gonna get thrown out soon.”

“Use your special lawyer tactics to get us out of trouble.”

“It’s almost as if you’re using me for protection from the law,” Sam points out, nudging Lucifer’s foot lightly under the table. “Which, by the way, isn’t going to happen.”

“Oh, fine then, be a stickler for the law, just make sure you land me in a decent jail cell,” Lucifer replies, barest hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth, and he pushes his leg back against Sam’s, a little more firm than Sam had expected him to. Not like he’s complaining. 

“For what, exactly? Obstruction of silence in the library?”

It’s not particularly funny, but they’re both laughing anyway, low and muffled by the rustling of their papers. Lucifer’s foot is tangled with Sam’s under the table, their ankles knocking together, and Sam feels a steady flush crawling up the sides of his neck and onto his cheeks. He wants to lean across the table and wipe a fleck of eraser dust off the back of Lucifer’s hand where it sits at the join between his index finger and thumb. He wants to see what would happen if he dragged his chair in a little and pushed his knee between Lucifer’s legs, instead of just pressing them together.

He’s three seconds away from acting on impulse when Lucifer’s expression shifts, darkening at the edges and Sam looks over his shoulder, sees Jess and Amelia heading towards them. _Fuck,_ he thinks, and feels Lucifer drawing their legs apart. Feels whatever was growing between them for a moment, heated and hesitant, slide away into nothing. 

The fleck of eraser dust falls off Lucifer’s hand.

“Sam!” Jess says. She pauses, then adds, “Hey, Lucian,” to which he gives a non-committal grunt. “How are you?” Stage-whispering as she puts her hand on Sam’s shoulder. 

“I’m okay,” Sam says, smiling up at her and gently trying to dislodge himself from her hand. “Hey, Amelia,” he adds, and she snaps her gum, nods at him from behind her phone.

“We were just printing some stuff out for Econ,” Jess explains, gesturing at the printers. Her eyes flick between Sam and Lucifer—who is tense, poised, ready to leave, radiating hostility—and, hesitantly, she adds, “There’s a party tonight, some of the upperclassmen are getting together at one guy’s apartment and apparently even freshmen are invited, do you two—” 

They haven’t been invited to or attended any parties since Jess’ first attempt at asking Sam in August. Lucifer doesn’t like the thick crush of bodies and the slide of sweat on skin, and Sam won’t go anywhere public and crowded without him, so. He’s never pushed the issue, mostly doesn’t want to go anyway, but it’s the weekend, or it will be in ten hours or so, and Sam doesn’t have anything to study for other than pre-law, which he can tackle in seven hours easy, on Sunday evening. He glances over at Lucifer, who is staring at the line of computers to their right, his jaw clenched, and lightly nudges his knee under the table.

“Hey,” Sam says, when Lucifer’s turned to face him, all slow reluctance, annoyed curl of his upper lip. “You wanna go to this party, man?”

Lucifer sucks in a breath. Glances at Jess and Amelia, and at Sam, and shrugs. His throat works for a few seconds before he finally replies with, “Yeah, all right, Sam,” and Jess lets out a little excited sound.

“It’s at Vincent Anderson’s,” she says, and Sam at least knows that’s the name of the football quarterback. “I think it starts at six, me and Amelia’ll be there around six forty-five, seven. You wanna meet up?”

Again, Sam looks at Lucifer; again, Lucifer takes a little while to choke out a response, affirmative nod of his head. Sam can see his hands shaking minutely against the table.

“Okay!” Jess says, her voice going a little uncertain like maybe she’s sensing the tension between them. “Well, we’ll see you there,” and she and Amelia walk off, snapping gum and swinging hips, hair falling down their backs.

“You could’ve said ‘no’ if you didn’t wanna go,” Sam points out, once they’re gone.

Lucifer just looks at him, one eyebrow arched, and “You wanted to,” he says, like that answers everything. “Come on, Sam, we should leave, I’ve looked at enough about the biodiversity of the Great Barrier Reef to last me a lifetime.” He grabs his books and stands, heading for the glass doors at the other end of the library, and Sam is helpless to do anything but follow. 

*

Vincent’s apartment is throbbing with a low bass line by the time they get there, sounds of laughter coming from inside and Sam knows it’s only going to get louder as the night progresses. He and Lucifer look at each other; Sam widens his eyes exponentially, Lucifer shrugs, tilts his head over, and they go in. Oddly, the song playing is “Devour” by Shinedown, which Sam would not have expected at a college party, but it’s okay, Shinedown’s a great band, and he can feel his shoulders relaxing inch by inch as he and Lucifer weave their way between juniors and seniors to try and locate Jess and Amelia.

“Sam!” he hears from over by the ice chest, crammed halfway full with beers and a few sodas, and he grabs one for himself and one for Lucifer and nods a greeting at Jess. The music is pulsating around him, getting into his bones and his brain, and he pops the cap off his bottle on a mounted opener in the shape of the Rocky Horror lips. Takes a swallow, and watches Lucifer watching him out of the corner of his eyes. 

“I’m glad you guys came,” Jess says, giving Sam’s shoulder a light nudge and smiling up at him. 

“Yeah,” he says, “we decided to crawl out of our hobbit hole for the night.”

Lucifer’s mouth twists and he doesn’t say anything, just rakes his eyes up and down Sam’s frame, six-foot-four and taller than everyone else in the entire room, possibly the whole apartment, and Sam rolls his eyes and self-consciously takes another sip of beer. 

“Okay, maybe not hobbit hole,” he amends. “But. We’re here.” He holds his arms out and bobs his head a little to the music, and Jess laughs, eyes glittering pretty in the dim lights overhead. She shouts something at him that he doesn’t hear all the way over the hard beat of drums—“Diamond Eyes” kicking in—and Sam just nods at her, reaching around to grab Lucifer’s arm. 

“We’re gonna go over there,” he says to her, gesturing with one hand, tugging at Lucifer with the other. Lucifer goes compliantly enough, his own bottle cap broken and crushed somewhere on the floor, and pretty soon they’re sitting against a wall in the corner, drinking beer and listening to Shinedown.

“I’m not regretting coming to this party until someone pukes on me,” Sam tells Lucifer, mouth right up against his ear. He doesn’t think he should be this close to Lucifer, not when he’s just starting to stand at the verge of getting drunk, but Lucifer’s not shoving him away and he doesn’t know anyone else here—unless you count Jess and Amelia, which Sam really _doesn’t_ —so he can’t quite bring himself to care.

Lucifer rests his lips against the bottle, hand on his leg. “I wouldn’t say that too loudly,” he advises. “Someone might actually come over and do it.”

“Gross,” Sam whines, laughing, and shifts his legs around in front of him, tilting the bottle almost at a ninety-degree angle to his face and swallowing a mouthful. “You’re gross, Luce.”

“It was your idea,” Lucifer points out.

“Details, details,” Sam mocks, and Lucifer laughs, head pressed back against the wall, line of his throat exposed. 

It would be a very, very bad idea for Sam to lean in and lick the side of his neck; the bead of sweat sliding down his skin. Sam watches it go, disappearing into Lucifer’s shirt and leaving a salty trail behind, and he feels the familiar heat of desire uncurl itself just below his ribcage. He swallows roughly, turning away and running a thumb across the wet glass of his beer. He’s vaguely aware of Lucifer’s eyes on him, but he doesn’t want to look over. 

“Sam, you all right?” Lucifer asks, lightly nudging Sam’s shoulder with his.

Sam nods once, quick and sharp, and gets unsteadily to his feet. “I gotta piss,” he says, and almost drops his beer into Lucifer’s lap. “You watch that for me.”

“Fuckin’ lightweight, man,” Lucifer laughs at him from the floor, but there’s no amusement in his eyes, and Sam gets the feeling that even if Lucifer doesn’t precisely know what just happened, he at least suspects something. He pushes his foot against Lucifer’s leg, once, then stumbles upstairs. 

The bathroom isn’t difficult to find, it’s one of the only empty rooms in the whole apartment and Sam pushes the door shut behind him, then grabs the sink and _breathes,_ shutting his eyes and leaning forward. He’s shaking, more tense than he realized, skin hot and wet, and he grabs the hand towel hanging on its rack and scrubs at his cheeks and forehead until they’re even more flushed than before. He’s drunk, just a little; he’s drinking beer with _Lucifer_ and that’s never a good combination, the alcohol does something to his brain and makes him think they’re actually together, no matter how much they actually aren’t. He’s coming too close to falling off the edge again, and he can’t, he _can’t_ —

Well. Yes, he can, he just has to get himself under control first. Can’t think about how good Lucifer looks when he’s pressed against the wall, shining brighter than anyone else in the entire room, the only thing in Sam’s vision, always. He’ll have to learn how to stuff that down, that near-constant urge to take Lucifer’s head between his hands and kiss him, slow and deep, imprinting his taste inside his mouth.

He’s a little scared he won’t be able to. That maybe one day, Lucifer will get fed up with Sam, and the way he looks at him. He’ll ask Sam to leave, and Sam will, because he still doesn’t know how to refuse Lucifer anything, and he’ll be stuck learning how to live without Lucifer’s blinding presence.

But it hasn’t happened yet, not since they’ve been at Stanford, sharing a room and sometimes brushing their teeth side by side because Sam’s too lazy to wait and Lucifer has better-tasting toothpaste anyway. 

There’s a bang on the door then, and someone calls, “Come on, asshole, you aren’t the only person here,” and Sam splashes his face with water and leaves, slipping downstairs and curling up next to Lucifer again, snatching his beer bottle back:

“Thanks for keeping it safe, I might even share if you’re lucky,” and Lucifer just shakes his head, biting a smile into the inside of his cheek.

“You think you’re so funny,” he murmurs, and clinks the edge of his bottle against Sam’s, pressing their thighs together, aligning the hems of their jeans.

Sam smirks. “Sure do make you laugh easy enough,” he says, mouth right back against Lucifer’s ear where it was before. He feels Lucifer’s shiver run through both of them, and doesn’t really allow himself to think before he’s leaning in, brushing his lips against the vulnerable place below Lucifer’s earlobe. Makes a quiet, helpless noise, hidden by the sound of the music throbbing above them, and presses his tongue against Lucifer’s heated, salt-flavored skin. 

“Sam,” Lucifer says, a little forcefully, going tense under Sam’s mouth, “don’t,” quiet and almost pleading, a tone Sam feels slide straight down to his stomach, right next to the alcohol. He has to work at backing up a little, mouth working around some form of apology, but he makes the mistake of looking at Lucifer’s eyes first, and that’s fucking _it,_ he’s gone. There’s something dark and heated in Lucifer’s gaze, something Sam hasn’t seen since the cabin in the Grand Tetons, and he feels all the decisions he made in the bathroom’s sick fluorescent light backsliding, coalescing in a meaningless lump in his chest as a low burn rises over his skin, thrumming in time with “For My Sake”. His fingers move of their own accord, threatening to curl into Lucifer’s shirt hem and just _pull,_ and Sam has to forcibly restrain himself. Shakes with the effort of it, watching Lucifer’s throat as he swallows his beer; his tongue slipping out to catch a drop of liquid just on the edge of his lower lip. 

“Sorry,” Sam says, though it’s obvious he doesn’t mean it. Lucifer shrugs, careless and quick, dismissing it all with this one gesture that rips Sam apart. He licks at his teeth and wonders if he can ever get the taste of Lucifer out of his mouth. 

Five minutes later he’s resting his head on Lucifer’s shoulder, draining his bottle empty as Lucifer brushes the pad of his thumb against Sam’s knee and mutters dark, humorous assumptions in Sam’s ear about everyone in the room. 

**_November_ **

They start fighting again, small, useless arguments that don’t do anything much besides frustrate Sam and give Lucifer an excuse to storm out of the dorm room, slamming the door shut behind him as he goes. Sam will be sitting on his bed, watching television (the Nature Channel, for fuck’s sake, on low) and Lucifer will come in, snap at him:

“Could you turn that _off,_ not all of us were blessed with the remarkable ability to sleep on our textbooks and absorb the material,” and Sam will snark back without thinking, unable to keep it in his chest, and they’ll fall into a routine, blistering heated back-and-forth commentary that usually ends with Lucifer growling out something low and dark and kicking at his bedframe as he leaves. It’s getting harder for Sam to distinguish the borders between toleration and absolute limit—and he’s got a high limit, he lived with Dean for almost nineteen full years. 

One afternoon, it’s raining, and Sam’s pressed against the window, pre-law textbook sprawled at his feet as he stares at the rivulets of water cutting down the glass. “This weather sucks,” he mutters, to no one in particular.

“As if you didn’t grow up in Kansas, heartland of thunderstorms and tornados,” Lucifer replies from his bed, without looking up from his computer.

“Was just making an observation,” Sam says sullenly, glaring at his hands. “It does suck, not like I can help hating rain.”

Lucifer’s quiet for a second, then he lets out a low chuckle, devoid of humor. “I can’t believe we’re actually _there,”_ he says, just on this side of angry, and Sam lets out a sigh, shifting so that the side of his head is pressed against the glass and he’s mostly facing Lucifer.

“What are you talking about?”

“We’ve become the friends that talk about the fucking _weather,_ for Christ’s sake—” He makes a gesture at the window. It looks oddly helpless, an observation that unsettles Sam. Lucifer does not wear weakness very well. 

“So what, it’s just—” Sam pauses, then sucks his lower lip between his teeth. “Luce, it’s not a huge deal, it’s just kind of a shitty afternoon, that’s all.”

“Shitty _month,_ more like,” and Sam can’t really argue with that.

They’re quiet for a few minutes. Sam’s failing at focusing on some paragraph about the United States’ court system and Lucifer’s blinking at his computer screen, not touching the keyboard or the mouse pad. 

“Do you want to explain what’s crawled up your ass and died?” Sam asks finally, when the silence becomes too much and he can’t hold the words against his cheek anymore.

Lucifer shoots him a surprised look that quickly coalesces into annoyance when Sam’s words register. “Nothing has ‘crawled up my ass’, Sam, I’d like to beg your pardon for being a little stressed over finals. I don’t know if you remember, but we do have them, they are coming up.”

Sam exhales, harder than he means to. “Jesus, Luce, you’ve been acting weird since that party at Vincent’s—”

“Pretty hard not to act a little bit different when you spent the entire evening with your tongue plastered to the side of my neck, Sam—”

“I did _not_ fucking have my tongue on your neck all night, and I didn’t actually hear you protesting at all about anything I was doing, you were practically _begging_ me to stay half an inch off your lap—”

“Drinking beer around you impairs my judgment, clearly.” Lucifer’s frowning with his entire face, laptop forgotten by his legs, and Sam feels a jolt of something very close to rage shoot down his spine. 

“Oh, are we talking about the cabin now? Fucking _three months_ after it happened and you suddenly wanna talk about it?”

“I’d prefer to avoid ever acknowledging that night even exists, Sam, thank you.”

Sam’s not aware of standing up until Lucifer pushes himself off his own mattress. “You _blew_ me, you ass—!”

Lucifer isn’t quite meeting Sam’s eyes—he hasn’t been almost since this fresh new hell of an argument started, and Sam would find that vaguely disconcerting if he wasn’t so focused on not ripping Lucifer’s throat out. “It was a mistake, I believe your reaction the following morning made that perfectly clear, and besides, as I said, I was drunk.”

Sam feels something tug at his chest— _his_ reaction?—but he’s not rising to Lucifer’s bait again. “Yeah, right, because you were so adamantly against getting me on that couch even when we were only starting to feel buzzed.”

“It was a _mistake_ —” Lucifer repeats, a little louder, and something in Sam snaps.

“For Christ’s sake, Luce! It’s not like you just tripped and fell in the dark and your face landed between my legs! You were perfectly fucking lucid the entire time, I remember everything about that night, I should know—”

“You clearly do not remember waking up and almost breaking my ribs with your foot trying to get away from me, acting as though I would give you the Black Plague unless I swore we’d never try anything like that again—”

Which Sam _does_ remember, thank you very much. He was terrified, waking up with a hangover in the Morningstars’ freezing, powerless cabin, Lucifer’s face pressed against his stomach. Terrified that his feelings would be uncontrollable after the line they’d crossed, and that their friendship would be ruined, all because he didn’t know when to fucking put on the brakes, with Lucifer.

Lucifer’s not the only one in their friendship who’s good at stonewalling his emotions and pushing people away at crucial moments.

“Well, maybe we should stop getting drunk around each other, then, since it obviously leads to such high and horrible places—” He pauses, watching some unidentifiable emotion flicker across Lucifer’s face, and asks, keeping his voice harsh, “Unless of course you’ve been holding back on me, and you actually _want_ to suck my cock, in which case here, it’s within touching distance right now, free of charge for the next sixty minutes—”

“I’d really rather not risk all my sanity just for one last night with you, Sam,” Lucifer says, voice oddly quiet for the atmosphere in the room, but Sam—god, he can’t _handle_ this anymore, this rollercoaster Lucifer’s got him on, blinding and too fast and so fucking in love with his best friend he can hardly see straight.

“You wanna try not fucking with _my_ sanity, then?” Sam asks, louder than he means to. “Sending out all these goddamn mixed signals—mouth between my legs one second, then telling me ‘don’t’ when we’re all drunk at some stupid college party?”

Lucifer goes stiff in front of him. “Sam,” he says, warning tone in his voice. 

But Sam’s spinning wildly out of control now, no stopping himself, and the words spill out before he can reel them back in: “Are you even in love with me a little bit, Luce?”

“I,” Lucifer starts, and then stops. “Sam, that’s. You can’t.” He folds his arms across his chest, eyes narrowing a little. “You’re doing a relatively decent job of sending out mixed signals as well, you know. Why don’t you stop acting as though you want me and then pushing me away every time I get close?” There’s something sharp and stinging in his tone, daring Sam to do something, anything. He’s been pushed past his breaking point already tonight, and at Lucifer’s words, dragged up ragged and angry from his throat, he slips further, red hot anger—at himself, at Lucifer, at both of them—welling up in his stomach. 

“You know what?” Sam yells, not thinking over the rushing blood in his ears, feeling every other emotion temporarily overridden by his desire to just hurt Lucifer. “My life would be so much fucking better right now if you weren’t in it.”

There’s a momentary tightening of Lucifer’s features, a flash of stunned hurt in his eyes, and then it’s gone, and he’s twisting his mouth into something resembling a snarl. “Well,” he says, real hate in his voice, “we can remedy that right fucking now.”

Sam’s already regretting saying it. “Luce,” he starts, reaching out, ready to throw away the past five minutes of screaming in each other’s faces just for a few seconds of clarity, but Lucifer jerks away like Sam scalded him.

“You think it’ll be difficult for me to forget you? You think this is any different for me than every other person I’ve ever had to leave? I have had a lifetime of practice at this, Sam Winchester.” He takes a breath, giving Sam enough time to feel something hard and heavy fall in his chest, and then adds, low and biting, “The time we spent together was just incidental,” and he grabs his phone and heads for the door. 

“Where the fuck are you going?” Sam asks, panic and terror rising in his voice. And then, desperately:

“Fuck’s sake, _wait,_ Lucifer.”

It’s one of maybe three times that Sam’s called him by his full first name, and for a second Lucifer stops, muscles tense under his shirt. He turns halfway, and Sam sees every emotion in his profile, nerves exposed raw and red in his eyes. He’s shaking, tiny tremors that move against his shirt, jaw gritted tight enough for the muscle to jump in his cheek, and Sam wonders if he’s regretting what he said. Even with Lucifer’s expression laid out open and flat as it is, he can’t really tell what he’s thinking.

Then Lucifer swallows, stiffens his back. His grip on the phone tightens, and he walks to the door, setting his fingers against the handle. Sam thinks he’s going to say something, but his throat just works for a few seconds and then he’s slamming the door shut behind him, walls rattling like always. 

It feels like all the air’s been sucked out of the room with him.

*

Lucifer comes back a few hours later, when the storm’s settled down some. He’s drenched, and doesn’t even look at Sam before he goes into the bathroom, lock catching on the door, ventilation system humming on with the light.

They don’t speak to each other again for almost a week.

*

“Did you and Lucian have a fight?”

Sam jumps at the sound of Jess’ voice, about two inches from his ear and too loud in the low, shuffling quiet of the library. 

“Jess, Jesus,” he says. Glances up at her and sees the way she’s chewing on her lower lip, like she’s worried, and forces himself to smile, though he’s honestly not sure how genuine it is. “Yeah, but we’re gonna be okay, it’s Luce. We’ve been friends for a long time now.”

She sits next to him, pressing one hand against his textbook and resting her purse on her lap. “Y’know, we’re not all cold-hearted Midwestern conservatives here in Palo Alto, Sam, feel free to call him your boyfriend, I don’t care. I have two aunts.”

He starts at that. “We aren’t,” he says, shaking his head, and then stops, thrown by Jess’ disbelieving look. “Luce and I are just friends, Jess, it’s not. He doesn’t want me like that.”

She raises her eyebrow. “Really.” 

“Really,” Sam says. “And I mean. It’s fine. It’ll be fine.”

Jess makes a doubtful sound behind her hand, then gestures with her thumb behind their table. “Why has he been leaning against that bookshelf for the past fifteen minutes, pretending to read Chaucer because he’s waiting for you to notice him, then?”

Automatically, Sam’s eyes shift in the direction Jess is pointing, and sure enough, there Lucifer is, one elbow on the bookshelf, hands propping _The Canterbury Tales_ open in front of him. “Oh,” Sam says, low, rough exhale, and Jess nods. 

“I don’t know what’s going on between you and I’m not going to ask,” she says. “But I’m sick of seeing you look six seconds away from drowning yourself in the Pacific, Sam.” She pushes at his shoulder with her fingertips. “Go talk to him. I’ve been waiting for one of you to make a move for the past ever, fuck’s sake.”

Sam rolls his eyes but gets up, taking his textbook with him. “Thanks, Jess,” he says, and she just waves him on.

“Thank me by inviting me to your wedding,” she calls, and Sam laughs once to humor her.

Then he’s standing next to Lucifer, and it’s tense and awkward and all Sam wants is to curl his fingers in the hem of his shirt and pull him in, press his lips to Lucifer’s jaw line and see what sorts of sounds he could draw from his throat.

“I highly doubt you’re actually concentrating on that,” Sam says, nodding at the book.

Lucifer glances up. If he’s surprised to see Sam there, he doesn’t say anything, just shuts Chaucer’s works and unceremoniously dumps them on the small pedestal where they were resting before. He grabs Sam by the crook of his arm and tugs him in the direction of the back of the library, where very few students go due to a lack of wireless connection. They’re squeezed between a series of dusty books about the Cold War and the only wall separating them from the outside world by the time Lucifer finally stops, hand still wrapped around Sam’s arm, and though they weren’t walking very quickly, both are breathing hard. 

“Please tell me you aren’t going to kill me back here,” Sam says.

Lucifer swallows, tongue darting out to wet at his lips, and Sam in no way at all tracks the movement with his eyes, lingering on Lucifer’s mouth for a lot longer than necessary afterwards.

“Sam,” Lucifer says, after a long moment, voice rough and just a little hesitant. “I can’t do this anymore,” and Sam flinches, eyes shutting, thinking _Christ,_ he can’t give Lucifer up yet, he’s not _ready_ —

He has just enough warning, just barely feels the heat of Lucifer’s body pressing flush against his and then they’re kissing, fierce and frantic and borderline desperate, Lucifer’s fingers in Sam’s shirt collar and Sam already shaking hard against him, fucking their tongues together as he splays his palms flat against Lucifer’s hips.

“Oh,” Sam breathes, when they pull apart, resting his forehead against Lucifer’s. He could fucking _die_ like this.

“I lied to you,” Lucifer says, low growl of words against Sam’s lips. “You have never been incidental, Sam, not to me. You are nothing less than the most important focal point of my life,” which is— _god,_ almost too much for Sam to bear. 

“I lied to you, too,” Sam says, as Lucifer works his mouth over the side of Sam’s neck. “I don’t know why the fuck I said my life would be better without you. Because it’s really,” he pauses and huffs out a frustrated laugh, still shaking under Lucifer’s hands, “really fucking not. At all.”

“ _Sam,”_ Lucifer says against his skin, and Sam decides he likes the way his name feels just there, in the dip of his collarbone beside his shoulder. 

“I want you forever,” Sam adds. “Not just when things are going okay. That’s not how it is, not with us. You’re just _in_ with me, man. And I’m in with you, y’know?” He pauses, swallows. “So far gone on you it ain’t even funny no more,” he admits, quiet and a little tense, and Lucifer looks up at him then, eyes dark with heat but sparking, at the backs, with something else. Something very much like hope.

“I’d like that,” he says, matching Sam’s tone, and drags him down for another kiss.

“We’ve been so stupid,” Sam says, with his mouth just brushing Lucifer’s. He exhales shakily, ragged sound that wants to be a laugh but can’t quite get it there, and Lucifer slides his hand up Sam’s spine, oddly comforting press of movement that has Sam shivering all over again.

“It’s okay, Sam,” Lucifer says, curling his free hand against the side of Sam’s face. “It’s just us now. You and me, Sam, until eternity and back,” and that—

That’s the best news Sam’s heard in a long, long time.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Settling](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1770175) by [Rainyhart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rainyhart/pseuds/Rainyhart)




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